Introduction
- Ever since the development of organized policing in America, the
U.S. enters modern times in which it must couple with the fact that its
structures of law enforcement were built to severely restrict humans
rights towards people of color, particularly Black people. As protest
numbers towards fighting against racial inequities, police brutality,
and civil rights issues increase, it becomes all the more imperative to
reassess police agencies and prisons across the country to target the
many cracks that remain in the justice system. The Vera Institute has
worked towards compiling information on incarceration trends since 1978
through the use of COJ and ASJ datasets in an effort to reveal
disproportionalities in jail/prison populations, admission rates,
release rates, and more at the county level. Analysis in this report
makes use of said data.
- The following report aims to highlight differences between white and
black jail/prison populations in particular. Variables of interest
include: black jail population, white jail population, total
black population ages 15-64, total white population ages 15-64, black
jail admissions, white jail admissions, total jail admissions, black
prison populations, and white prison populations. Numerous
media sources tend to form comparisons between whites and blacks in
America regarding incarceration, which resulted in personal curiosity to
determine if most disparities were caused by the most populous
states, if admission rates were fairly equal between white and
black in comparison to their respective population totals by race as
well as by total admission rates in general, and if there is
reason to suspect of underreporting or a lack of transparency in the
data. As a result, incarceration will be measured based off of jail
populations and prison populations averaged over the years 2000-2018
from the culmination of all county data for state-level analysis, as
well as by admission number totals using the same process. This report
hopes to answer some of the following questions or curiosities given the
variables of choice:
- Have there been any dramatic changes in prison population by race in
the most populous states?
- Are the most populous states “to blame” for incarceration
disparities, or should efforts be focused elsewhere?
- Relative to a race’s population in a state, is the admission rate to
prison excessively high or low?
- For each black prison admission in a state, how many white prison
admissions are there?
- Are there certain states that lack accountability in reporting
prison data? Why is that?
- When factoring in the racial makeup by percentage of the U.S., are
prison populations on average evenly distributed between whites and
blacks?
Summary Information